'Diablo IV' skips Mac gamers, and Whoopi Goldberg is mad about it
Blizzard Entertainment's latest game in the series, "Diablo IV," is not available for Mac users, and Whoopi Goldberg has turned to social media to vent her dismay about it.
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The reality is that Macs are one of the best platforms for gaming and Metal3 is the reason.
The reason that Macs suck for gaming is 100% on the developers who take the crappy approach of taking a Windows game and wrapping it in Cider and calling it a Mac game. There’s literally NOTHING Mac in this approach. It’s a Windows game running on Linux software and it will always have a performance hit.
Compare the old version of Eve Online to the current Metal based version and the difference is night and day. Then compare that to the iOS version of Eve Echoes and you start to get the picture that it’s not Mac hardware that’s the problem. We’ve been screwed by idiot developers who just treat us as a third class citizen in gaming.
We don’t need AAA titles if this is their approach. We need games designed specifically for Macs that makes people want to game on Macs that leave Windows PCs and gaming consoles in the dust. We can do it if developers don’t develop for the money but develop to showcase their talent. Ego is a massive driver and will be the only way Macs can get out of their gaming doldrums.
PS: Imagine playing Jedi Academy with a Vision Pro, and executing the force power against your enemies……
Developing for the Mac with Metal et. al., takes expertise and effort to port existing games that aren't using Apple's APIs.. It also means that there's a different code base to test and support. As a business decision, If the developer doesn't take the cost into account and doesn't think they'll make up the effort in sales, then a port to native technologies on the Mac won't get done regardless of the "ego" strokes of saying "I ported to the Mac and it runs so much better".
Use of high level frameworks mask that effort over and can be a much more "justifiable" - but as you say it's at the expense of performance.
It will be interesting to see in practice how well the porting toolkit works to reduce the costs/efforts to port to Mac native technologies.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/06/08/diablo-iv-skips-mac-gamers-and-whoopi-goldberg-is-mad-about-it
They never ported Overwatch. OpenGL was the key to older Mac ports. Since Apple switched to Metal, games with a custom engine needs months of work to port.
They are also being bought out by Microsoft so I doubt Mac support will be a priority after that.
A lot of older games run really well through compatibility layers. Here is someone running Half-Life 2 in Parallels (9:20) on M1/M2 at 60FPS:
If it's between not having support at all and a low-effort compatibility layer version, the latter is the better option. The Steam Deck has over 8,000 games due to using compatibility layers.
Diablo IV runs around 90FPS on M2 Max with the porting kit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/14307be/diablo_iv_on_m2_max_using_macos_sonoma_and_game/
Mac users will pay for games which means developers are losing money by keeping Macs out of the loop. But Mac users are decerning and won’t buy titles if they are a hassle. Cider is the biggest reason Mac users don’t buy games. It turns good games on PCs into crappy games on the Mac which turns people away from a potentially great gaming platform.
Mac developers need to stop with status quo games and build limitless games to showcase the Mac. Let’s see if they have the balls to give it a go.
we NEED native games.
These games still need to sell, something which they haven't in the past. Now that we are finally getting acceptable mid-range GPU's, and some basic software support from Apple, maybe they will.
It's going to take a few years of YOU, and many, many others to buy the few game ports that are starting to coming out now, to make the Mac a viable market for gaming publishers. And I don't know about you, but I'm not in the market for Death Stranding, I thought Resident Evil Village was a crap port, and No Man's Sky is simply not my kind of game.
The reason WoW even has decent Metal support is because Apple wrote that code and gave it to Blizzard. For how many games do you think Apple is willing to do this? I can count them on one 1 finger.
So unless we get some day one ports, that massively sell, this is still going to be a long, long road.